


Home Soil

by UrbanAmazon



Category: Titan AE (2000)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Fatalism, Gen, Human Nature, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-09 09:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5534318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanAmazon/pseuds/UrbanAmazon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joseph Korso knew space… or so he thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Soil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boingboing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boingboing/gifts).



Joseph Korso knew space.  His first flight at age seven had been a commercial one, a quick hop over to Mars to visit his uncle on the mining colony for a family weekend.  It was the taste of the dust that he remembered from that trip more than anything, digging into his tongue when he swallowed and his sinuses when he breathed.  It tasted  _ wrong _ , stale and dry.  It got into everything, no matter how many times they passed through the pressurization docks, and he’d never been happier to step out of the freighter and into Earth’s comparative perfume.  

He knew the crackle of treated glass when it started to fail against a vacuum (age nine).  He knew the cold and how it seeped into your skin through a suit, turning moisture into crystal when you stayed out in a spacewalk too long (age eighteen).  He knew the faint sting of solar radiation on his optic nerves when he forgot to shield his faceplate and there was no atmosphere to do it for him (age nineteen).  

Space was full of a thousand ways to kill you and not ever notice (before you started taking into account the aliens), and yet Korso kept going up, and up, and up whenever he could find a handhold to take him higher; pilot’s license, spacewalk license, engineering apprenticeship... it only made that breath of home all the much sweeter when his boots hit familiar soil.

The day he told his best friend just that, Sam had flicked his workscreens off and looked at Korso very seriously.  “I… think I need to tell you about this ship I’ve been commissioned to make, Joseph.  I’d like to have you join the project.”

Korso said yes before Sam could even show him the blueprints.  Engineering, piloting, anything that Sam wanted him to contribute, he would.  The  _ Titan _ made perfect sense in Korso’s mind, not as some contingency plan or backup in case of intergalactic hostilities, but from that part of Korso’s mind that kept sending him up into the stars to find… whatever it was he was looking for, until it was time to come home.

Another home.  Another  _ Earth _ , and mankind could just stretch further and further out there and not have to worry about the cold and empty route home.  Like frogs and lilypads, hopping a little further each time.

Joseph Korso knew space… or so he thought.  No one could have anticipated the Drej.

***

War changes a person.  Korso had heard that before, but it wasn’t fair; what had happened with the Drej hadn’t been a war.  It hadn’t even really clicked at first.  There’d been no nightmares in Korso’s head, waking him with cold sweat and shaking like so many others in the refugee camp on Centauri.  He’d not had any family to try locating on those long, scrolling lists they projected by the docking zones, alive or dead.  

Of course, there was Sam… but  _ everyone _ was looking for  _ Professor Sam Tucker _ .  In the quagmire of negotiations for colony space and resources with aliens who’d been there first, the infighting for that space, and the utter mess of lifting a few million humans with no space experience into zero gravity, the one constant whisper was for the  _ Titan _ .  It had survived, surely.  People had seen it streak past their shuttles and wink into light speed.  No, not a lie.  Where had it gone?  What did the generals and captains mean when they said they didn’t know?  Hadn’t Professor Tucker  _ told _ them?  Did he not trust them?  Had he stolen it?  Why?  Where  _ was _ he?  What if he ran because the  _ Titan _ failed?  Why  _ else _ wouldn’t he come back?

And it hurt to listen… but it hadn’t hurt enough for Korso to tell them about Sam’s ring map… and Cale.  

***

Before the loss of Earth, Korso had managed four months in space before he’d felt that pull of gravity, that tickle to return to familiar soil.

Four months came and went.  Then six.  Then eleven.  At eleven and a half, Korso woke up with a headache so bad he couldn’t see out of one eye, and no medication to alleviate the pressure of his free-floating brain in his skull.

Korso managed to haggle a week’s rent on Kelper in exchange for his sidearm, a full week planetside with actual gravity and air he could breathe, but it didn’t work.  It wasn’t that Kelper was an alien world with red skies and acidic yellow soil for its plants, or that the aliens eyed him warily from behind their fins or their nictating membranes or eyes bigger than Korso’s head.

_ Ich.  Human.  Did you hear?  Meddled so much attention, the drej decided to neuter them. _

It was the other humans at Kelper that did it.  Korso saw the slouch of shoulders with poor bone density from low gravity for too long, the red spots of poor oxygen levels, the wobble like heavy inebriation to cut the pain of atrophied muscles.  Soon enough, they’d flee to the drifter colonies that had begun to cluster together at the edge of declared space.  Or they wouldn’t.

The military generals and politicians had spread too thin, and couldn’t find each other enough to communicate, let alone work together.  No one had a nationality anymore, only a species… and everyone else was just trying to keep themselves alive.

So when he got his hands on the  _ Valkyrie _ , it was alien crew only.  He could trust them, at least, to be… well, alien.  To not remind him of home, or to ask about it.  To be reliable in that they were  _ better _ at being in space.  They belonged.

Humanity, apparently, was still only meant to be passing through.  

_ Maybe Sam  _ had _ run away _ , Korso thought… and then it refused to stop.  With every station he stopped at in hopes of seeing Cale’s name on the registered refugee manifest, it persisted like rust eating at his inner steel.  

On the drifter colony New Francistown, the humans had divided into gangs on the various station levels.  The biggest paying job was corpse disposal.  Korso couldn’t leave fast enough.

On the planetside colony of Janiko 9, the humans had hooked the indigenous aliens into manual labour because oxygen wasn’t present in the atmosphere.  

Korso docked the  _ Valkyrie _ with a place called… well, something he couldn’t pronounce because he didn’t have the required secondary esophagus, but humans had strip-mined the asteroid so thoroughly that the architecture was crumbling every time a micrometeor shower passed by.  The dock master had run Korso back into his ship the moment he’d seen his species.  

It wasn’t that Korso never fought back.  Charm worked sometimes, and force worked others, but as the months became years and longer, it became a consistent answer.

_ Humans wait. _

_ Humans back of the line. _

_ Humans not welcome here _ .

The day Korso found the first gray hair in his beard, he realized the galaxy was right.

Thousands of years of human civilization, versus aliens that had been cruising through space since before  _ homo erectus _ managed to stand upright.  Hundreds of alien species that had managed to agree on common language, exchange rates, and trade, versus a single species that still used invectives based on skin tone or accent.  

They’d never stood a chance, really… and it really seemed like they’d never had one to start with.  They didn’t deserve one.  

Korso knew space.  

***

Convincing himself that Sam had just wanted to get the  _ Titan  _ as far away from human corruption was the easy part.  

Learning to understand Drej tongue (not that they even  _ had _ tongues) had been much harder, if Korso was being honest with himself.  

***

The cold hurt more than the in-and-out stab of pain through his torso.  He could feel the creep of it, the crystallizing of the blood right at the wound, seeping back up through his ruptured blood vessels.  The heavy and antique spacewalk suit still had pressure controls functioning, but that only meant Korso had the option of bleeding or freezing to death on the  _ Titan _ ’s hull.

Stupid.  He’d been  _ so _ stupid, and selfish.  So human, really.  Stupid fatalist thoughts taking up too much space in his head, not allowing any inkling that Preed might have just been looking out for himself.  

And he’d been so stupid to not consider just how much Cale was like his father.  

Fifteen years in space, and Cale hadn’t given up.  All acid tongue and attitude, and yet Cale still charged forward with a plan, with a want, with an  _ idea _ that could carry others forward with him.  He carried Akima, certainly… just like Sam had swept Korso up in the idea of  _ making a whole world _ , once upon a time.

Korso chuckled, and his whole chest hurt.  He lumbered up, one foot and then the other sealing their magnets up onto the energy clamp’s manifold.   _ Humans _ .  They really never did know how to quit.

Korso had forgotten that.  He thought it had died with Sam, and he’d been wrong.

He wedged his cannon between the clamp’s arms, not wanting to waste air with coughing at the effort.  It wasn’t quite the right size, and floated free when he let go.  He’d have to hold it there.  

Korso knew space.

He knew space, but he knew Earth, too.  He remembered Earth.  

As the familiar snap-sizzle of Drej beams bathed over the surface of the  _ Titan _ , Korso bared his teeth, dug in, and thought about frogs and lilypads, and wondered if it would feel the same if he stepped back on the Earth’s sweet soil from the inside this time.  

***  
It did.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy yuletide madness! I'd just recently rewatched this movie, and the idea to explore Korso's motivations and his decision to help Cale in the end... it wouldn't leave me alone. I do hope this might make you smile (and not too angsty!), because no matter what Korso might have done, they couldn't have made Planet Bob without him. He deserves a bit of an epitaph.


End file.
